I have switched to the smaller Aduino Nano for use in my kite flight recorder and this has enabled me to squeeze it into a tiny box that makes it look so nice. It even glows blue when it’s processing data which is rather cool. To recap it takes the temperature and pressure and using a bit of crazy maths in the form of the Hypsometric equation and logs the highest and lowest temperature and altitude extremes.

I have noticed a bit of a problem with it and that is for it to accurately plot your correct starting altitude it needs to know the current pressure at sea level in order for the equation to work. However, this really doesn’t bother me too much as it can measure the height gained accurately.

I have built something that works. It has taken me months of programming play to get this far. Following on from my success the other night, I once again put the Hypsometric equation to good use and got my arduino starting to calculate altitude, recording and displaying it on a small LCD screen. I love how compact it all is. It’s a thing of beauty. Check out my video of it here.

I took it for a walk yesterday and as I feared the fluctuating readings do cause quite a large margin of error. All part of the testing process though and what I learnt will be fed back into the project.